


Untimely

by beer_good



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Community: intoabar, Crossover, F/M, Immortality, Past Relationship(s), Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-04
Updated: 2015-05-04
Packaged: 2018-03-28 23:40:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3874255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beer_good/pseuds/beer_good
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the <b>intoabar</b> challenge: Drusilla goes into a bar and meets… Zoe Washburne!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Untimely

**Title:** Untimely  
**Author:** Beer Good   
**Rating:** PG13  
**Fandom/timeline:** Buffy/Firefly, set around _Serenity_  
**Word Count:** ~900  
**Warnings:** Canon character death  
**Summary:** Written for the **intoabar** challenge: Drusilla goes into a bar and meets… Zoe Washburne!

 _"In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal. This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth."_  
\- Douglas Adams, _The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy_

 

Bars don't change much. She barely notices them these days, they all blend together, from cheap East End dives and country inns to house clubs and hipster cafes to spaceship cantinas and demon bars. She comes to bars for the people, navigating mostly by Sight, as if age has finally dulled all her other senses to blissfully vague background noise.

She's weaving through yet another busy spaceport bar like so many nights before, a drink in her hand for disguise along with the human face that takes more effort to keep up every… however long a year is now. All around her she feels minds, futures and pasts, twirling like crimson tendrils as she searches for something she hasn't seen a million times in a million bars. Some part of her still hoping to catch sight of someone she hasn't seen since... still sees everywhere but can't touch, can't kill, can't hold on to. It's been so long, so very long, and she still hears horses and V8 engines every time a rocket fires.

This one, she realises.

There's a warrior here - well, several, all with the same dull memories of death and glory and fear and madness she's seen since before humans learned how to fly; they always have wars, there was one just hours or days or years ago. But there's one drinking alone in a corner with her back to the wall, recent grief like a cloud of blood around her. The desperate memory ( _Wash baby baby no come on we gotta move baby PLEASE_ ) so strong it almost sends her reeling, almost as if it was her heart shattered by the giant stake.

This one.

The woman looks up when Drusilla sits down at her table; not in alarm, just the bored eye of a killer assessing and dismissing a possible threat. Good. Drusilla locks eyes with her and _pushes_ \- not enough to take her completely, just to make her listen. Slow, deliberate movements, fishing the olive out of her glass, jabbing a toothpick straight through its red heart, holding it up to focus her pain. "Listen to me, dearie."

It should be so easy, grab someone, drink them, make them drink, make them join you, but it doesn’t work anymore. Ever since the spaceship, all she can do is kill, everyone stays dead. But surely if they want it, if she promises to help them...? ( _Something glowing and glistening, something_ ) It worked before. She stares into the woman's (Zoe's) eyes, not having to use words, just feeding her emotions. Promising release from this. Trying to explain the dark beauty of the world she lost, all those years ago, to think past the centuries after the fall of LA, those countless years half-sleeping, half-dreaming on the ark while others were born and lived and died of old age without ever knowing solid ground, then drifting from moon to moon to find others to help her make sense of this world where time doesn't work… The mad, insane whirlwind, the certainty they could have instead of this. She jabs, worries at the memory of _him_ (Wash, his name was Wash) of the shattered window, the stake, the dying gasp, an entire future ripped away in an instant.

But the woman just stares at her, then blinks like someone looking away from an abyss and frowns. "I'm sorry, can I help you?"

And the fog lifts for a few seconds and Drusilla understands just how lost she is, and has to laugh. No. Too soon. It hasn't happened yet. She sees it (the ship tumbling from the sky, the impact, the proud smile _I'm a leaf on the _\- ) but it hasn’t happened yet. So many things have, so impossibly many things are too late, and she had to pick one that isn't. She sees Zoe's eyes light up at something behind her, and Drusilla knows who it is (who it's not, who it'll never be again) before she forces her own eyes - her normal eyes - to focus, sees him clumsily making his way through the crowded bar over towards them, dead man walking without knowing it.__

For the briefest of moments, Drusilla's face slips, she relaxes, resigns. "We had Slayers back then," she mumbles past her fangs. "No one lived too long."

But if the other woman notices, or lets herself notice, she doesn’t show it, she's busy smiling and waving. "Wash, honey, over here."

When he gets there, Zoe's alone. He looks around. "Who was that you were talking to?"

Zoe looks at the empty chair in front of her, as if trying to remember something, fighting off a vague sense of vertigo she's never felt even in outer space. Then she shrugs. "I don't know. Some crazy old woman."

Wash is about to tell her she didn't look very old from where he was standing, but thinks better of it. "Kaylee's done fixing the ship up. Captain says we're leaving for Lilac in an hour. Fanty and Mingo have an 'easy' bank job for us, which for the record doesn't make me think we're humped in any way…"

"Relax, sweetie." She kisses his cheek. "This is what we do."

 

* * *

The spaceport at Beaumond never sleeps, a constant jumble of travellers, merchants, farmers, whores and soldiers. Ghosts. The last vampire glances up at the afternoon sun, still wondering that it doesn't burn her. When a ship blots it out she pulls her black widow's veil tighter around her face and disappears into the crowd. She has to remember that there was someone here she… She'll be back. Tomorrow, or a month from now, or...


End file.
